It was bound to happen, and it happened. What exactly happened is unclear, although one side claims some men with guns were defending a gas station while the other side claims they were just random vigilantes looking for a fight. Either way, it happened.

Three people were shot early Wednesday, two fatally, law enforcement officials said, during a chaotic night of demonstrations over the shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black resident whose children were nearby as their father was shot this week by a white police officer.

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They come fresh-faced from elite law schools, leather briefcases unscuffed and starched white shirts, ready to “do justice” by putting the bad guys where they belong. Some leave after their commitment. Some remain for the duration of their career. They’re prosecutors and they believe that what they do is both right and necessary.

But the closest they ever get to the life of a defendant is a social distance away in a courtroom. For years, I’ve urged that every new prosecutor spend a week in prison, eat Nutraloaf and stare at walls when they aren’t dodging an angry guy with a tattoo across his forehead that says “kill.” Continue reading →

As of July 29, 2020, police have shot to death 111 black people and 215 white people. Each death has its own story, some of which are about police abuse. Jacob Blake didn’t die, and so he isn’t one of these numbers, and his shooting isn’t a simple case of a cop execution.

Police were called because of a “domestic dispute,” which turned out to be a “verbal altercation” between two women. Blake apparently tried to break it up. Police arrived and details are sparse after that. It would seem that Blake was the good guy here, but whether the cops knew that, or even knew who Blake was, is unclear. It’s like they did what they normally do, tried to put the situation on hold until they could figure it out. Continue reading →

Protests present particular problems to police. They see masses of people, not individuals, for the most part, and when they do a round up, it’s not for individualized conduct but for being part of the crowd. It might be a mob. It might be a protest. Maybe the person arrested “deserves” it, whatever that means, or the person arrested might just be a warm body within arm’s reach of a cop.

Portland’s new progressive prosecutor, Mike Schmidt, has chosen to deal with arrests “categorically.”

Ten days after taking office, Mr. Schmidt effectively dismissed charges against more than half of about 600 people arrested since the protests began at the end of May.

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There’s a lot of conflicting information about the impact of marijuana, and it’s not accidental. It’s the result of the federal prohibition on the study of the demon weed. Whether it belongs on Schedule I is a huge issue, but the fact that we’re bereft of sound, scientific scholarship is a problem that smacked states legalizing weed in the face. How much better off would we have been had pot been studied? But alas, it couldn’t be and it wasn’t.

So let’s do it again, but this time with people.

In the wake of the protests over the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, some faculty published an open letter of demands to overcome “anti-Blackness racism” at Princeton. Like many such letters, it included good and bad proposals. Most distinctive and disturbing, however, was the demand for the creation of a faculty committee empowered to “oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of the faculty.”

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In 1990, New York City had 2,245 murders. People demanded that something be done, and over the ensuing years, the cops tried two things: the strategy called “Broken Windows” and the tactic called “Stop & Frisk.” While the strategy of the Rockefeller Drug laws had been an abysmal failure, ratcheting up sentences under the theory that they would eventually be so harsh that no rational person would risk going near drugs for fear of spending their lives in prison, there really aren’t all that many strategies around to address the phenomenon of crime.

Then something weird happened. Crime just faded. Crime rates dropped precipitously. The murder rate was at a tenth of what it was. The police claimed they were responsible for this miracle, but it was a lie. Broken Windows just ruined a lot of lives for petty quality of life offenses while Stop & Frisk, before it was held unconstitutional, was a spectacular failure both in its abuse of black and Hispanic young men and accomplishing almost nothing in terms of its sole justification, taking guns off the street. Continue reading →

Much like law school, where classes in social justice have displaced such banal subjects as Evidence, med school has also succumbed to the lessons of the passionate. And we thought they were the smart kids because they could do math.

There have been a growing number of calls for doctors to make the fight against racism central to what they do. The American Board of Internal Medicine, for example, recently decried “structural, systemic and cultural racism.” Meanwhile, the American Academy of Pediatrics has implored its members to “dismantle racism at every level” of society.

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What plot twist could make the unseemly events in Portland turn into a moment of sufficient farce that even the New York Times would notice that the protesters in Portland were still there even after the federal agents, who were the real reason for the renewed outrage until they weren’t, were forgotten? All it took was the Proud Boys to show up.

A group of about 200 protesters, including members of the Proud Boys and families supporting the police, gathered along the courthouse sidewalk beginning at 11 a.m. Many of them were holding American flags, while others carried assault rifles and wore tactical military gear.

Almost immediately, a similar number of Black Lives Matter protesters gathered across the street, many dressed in all black and carrying shields or paintball guns.

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Remember that part of Joe Biden’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention where he recalled his having been falsely accused of sexual assault by Tara Reade, and acknowledged the error of his long-standing support for the Title IX sex police on campus dedicated to denying male students of the opportunity to defend themselves, to have at least minimal due process when accused of heinous offense, now that he, himself, had suffered the same and survived it because he enjoyed the opportunity to challenge his accuser?

No, of course you don’t, because it didn’t happen. Continue reading →

Sergio Peçanha is what the Washington Post calls a “visual columnist,” meaning that he puts together charts and graphs to make his point. Whether you’re a charts and graphs kinda person or not, these can often be very persuasive devices to visualize a problem that the mind dismisses. As with any device, visual or rhetorical, it works for those for whom it works and is just another way to make a point.

But while the emphasis is on the visuals, it can also cause people to miss the fact that the point itself is fundamentally nonsensical or wrong. When that happens, focus on the graphs can help to clarify the significance of a point that goes without scrutiny, a point like this one: Continue reading →